Landscapes of the ancien regime: Robert Oresko reviews the Kunsthistorisches Museum's impressively comprehensive overview of the career of Bernardo Bellotto, which took the artist from Italy to Warsaw

Apollo, June, 2005 by Robert Oresko

One outstanding virtue of the exhibition Bernardo Bellotto genant Canaletto: europaischen Veduten, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, is its comprehensiveness. Every phase of the artist's career is explored in seventy-one exhibits, mainly paintings, from his early Italian views of the late 1730s to his final work for King Stanislas Poniatowski in Warsaw in the 1770s. Belotto is confirmed as one of the most accomplished and attractive vedutisti of eighteenth-century Europe in an exhibition distinguished by its clarity and compactness.

A second virtue is the ease with which the catalogue can be used. In 248 pages, each painting, drawing and print, some with details and supporting comparative material, is reproduced in (occasionally variable) colour. Consultation of the catalogue while visiting the exhibiton is essential because labelling has been kept to a minimum.

The prelude to the exhibition itself is a sequence of panels juxtaposing reproductions of paintings by Bellotto in the exhibition with photographs of the same views taken from nearly identical vantage points. The juxtaposition of the painting of the Freyung (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) with a recent photograph demonstrates that Bellotto used two different vantage points, while the photograph of the facades of the university building and Jesuiten-kirche in Vienna, also reproducing a painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, captures Bellotto's dramatic fall of oblique light nearly perfectly. Some of these visual comparisons are reproduced in the catalogue.

Once into the exhibition, the first dominant image is that of the fortress of Konigstein (National Gallery of Art, Washington). This is flanked by two short walls bearing early work, from the Italian years of 1738 to 1747. Smaller pictures, such as that of the Grand Canal (National Gallery, London), show Bellotto's debt to his maternal uncle, Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, although even by the view of the Rio dei Mediacanti (Galleria dell' Accademia, Venice) his distinct style is apparent. This is clear in the densely coloured painting of Gazzada (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) and even more so in the View of Turin with a Bridge over the Po (Galleria Sabauda, Turin), a direct commission, with its pendant, from Carlo Emanuele III of Savoy, King of Sardinia. This is a key picture in many ways, for it points to the princely level of patronage upon which Bellotto came to rely, to a more northern-orientated circle of patrons and to such characteristic elements of staffage as the gilded coach, which became a staple part of the artist's vocabulary.

The second room of the exhibition is devoted to Bellotto's work in Dresden for one of his two major patrons, Friedrich August II, Saxon elector of the Holy Roman Empire and, from 1733, Augustus III, elected King of Poland-Lithuania. During his two extensive periods of residence in Dresden, from 1747 to 1757 and from 1762 to 1766, Bellotto formed part of one of the most cultivated courts in Europe, one which was heavily influenced by Italian artists and composers, painters and musicians, one strongly attuned to Italian culture. During these two periods of residence, Bellotto painted scenes of the urban life of a royal capital, with minutely detailed depictions of the architectural monuments. One of his most successful images is that of the Zwingerhof (Hermitage, St Petersburg). Bellotto created a vantage point well above the palace complex, to which he gave a nearly scenographic perspective, in the nature of a stage set by a member of the Galli-Bibiena family.

The five-year interruption in Bellotto's nearly twenty years at Dresden was due to the structure of dynastic contacts. Friedrich August's consort was the Archduchess Maria Josefa, elder daughter of Emperor Josef I, sister of the Bavarian electress Maria Amalia and first cousin of the Empress Maria Theresia. Maria Amalia's son and daughter had married into the Saxon House of Wettin. These connections gave Bellotto access to the courts of Munich and Vienna, where he spent the years between 1757 and 1762.

While at Vienna, he painted a sequence of pictures depicting imperial and noble residences, among the most striking his two views of Schlosshof (both Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), a lustschloss, some forty miles outside Vienna, created for Prinz Eugen of Savoy and eventually acquired for the imperial court. The view of the garden front demonstrates an acute knowledge of Dutch landscape composition, with the space divided equally in two parts--as in a painting by Philips de Koninck--the sky and the Schloss dominating the upper half.

Bellotto's career within the circle of the courts of Dresden, Munich and Vienna came to an abrupt halt in 1763, with the deaths of both Friedrich August and his chief minister, Heinrich, Graf von Bruhl. Bruhl had commissioned the view of the Zwingerhof acquired in 1768 by Catherine II of Russia. After four years in administrative employment at Dresden, Bellotto found, in 1767, his second and final sovereign patron in Stanislaw August Poniatowski, a Polish noble, former lover of the Empress Catherine and King of Poland-Lithuania in 1764, elected in succession to the artist's previous employer, Friedrich August of Saxony. Bellotto remained in Warsaw until the end of his life, and the last large room of the exhibition houses twenty-two paintings borrowed from two Polish collections, the Zamek Krolewski (the Castle) and from the Muzeum Narodowe w Warsawie. At the King's request, Bellotto painted a total of twenty-six views of Warsaw.